


The First Drink

by embroiderama



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-20
Updated: 2010-01-20
Packaged: 2017-10-06 12:28:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 293
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/53641
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/embroiderama/pseuds/embroiderama
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A new tradition</p>
            </blockquote>





	The First Drink

They have a new tradition, since the accident. Since the hospital. Since burying the car in the unmarked grave known as scrap metal recycling. Since the doctor with his downcast eyes and his carefully planned speech. Since Sam gave in and cried, with his head pressed against the neat pressed sheets on the side of Dean's bed.

Since they limped out of that hospital together, knowing that nothing would ever be the same, and yet it was. They still had what they'd always had: the job, the road ahead, each other.

Neither of them should have been drinking, really, with the pain killers and the antibiotics and Dean's concussion. But if this wasn't a time to drink, really, there wasn't anything else that would qualify. Their father's wake, observed by the two sons alone, in the back of a bar in a small town.

The first drink would be for him. For Dad. The second drink might be for the pain and the third for the anger, the fourth for remembering and the fifth for forgetting, but Dean saw that always, now, the first drink would be for John Winchester. He imagined erecting an altar with a photo and an earthen bowl, to be filled with a few swallows of beer every night and whiskey on holidays. An offering.

"God rest his soul," Sam said, and Dean hoped so. That some god or spirit or something helped his father's soul to rest in death, as it never had during his life. He didn't want to have to come back here to dig him up, to salt and burn and say the truly final good-bye. But he would if he had to; after all, he knew he was nothing more than his father's son.


End file.
